Alarm Management Systems (“ALMS”) are considered an important layer of protection for operating organizations. In general ALMS helps operating organization personnel, such as at manufacturing or processing plant, to detect abnormal plant conditions in the early stages which allows those conditions to be addressed and rectified before they turn into larger issues. ALMS can also provide an organization management team or onsite personnel with data that indicates the general health and well-being of a particular plant. This can help onsite personnel and management to make decisions about staffing, plant renovation projects, repair part inventories, and many other decisions that involve the allocation of resources and expenditures for a particular plant.
In general, plants can be configured with field devices that may include various sensors, cameras, temperature sensors, level sensors, flow sensors, valves, switches, vibration sensors, liquid detection sensors, and many other similar devices. These sensors and devices can communicate information via wired connections or wirelessly to data acquisition hubs, remote computer systems, central computer systems, etc. Often, pre-configured alarm levels will be configured as part of a software program running on a computer system. When a particular sensor or device conveys data that would “trip” or exceed the bounds of the pre-configured alarm levels, an alarm is triggered. Once triggered an alarm can be relayed to onsite personnel or displayed on a computer display terminal or other user display. Such alarms allow onsite personnel to manage potential issues over large geographic areas or with complex equipment or both. When an alarm is triggered, personnel can be alerted and deployed to assess and fix potential issues with the plant. Often times alarm values will be set to levels that will alert plant personnel to a minor issue that can be fixed, such as by replacing a component on the brink of failure, before the issue turns into something that would cause longer downtime for a particular system. Alarm Management Systems, when designed and functioning well, can help a plant to be more reliable and have extended uptime intervals.
Current Alarm Management Systems are often managed by an individual onsite control systems engineer and plant reports are often manually compiled by this engineer. These reports can be compiled on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis depending on the engineers time and direction by management. Manually assembling a report is often time consuming for the control systems engineer. It would thus be desirable for a system to generate an alarm report automatically with limited or no interaction from the control systems engineer.